Hi this will be a bit of a quick one because I don’t exactly know a whole heck of a lot about layer modes, but I know enough to know that I love them.

My goal here is to pretty simple. Briefly gloss over what layer modes are, show you three nice tricks, and encourage you to play around with them, and see what you can make happen.

So to begin, what are layer modes? Well layer modes are the different ways that the content in a layer can interact with the content in the layers under it to display its data. By default, layers display in normal mode. This means that the content is unaffected by the layer contents under it. However, with the other layer modes this is not so. Your options are slightly different depending on the program you are using, but in the GIMP your options are: Normal, Dissolve, Multiply, Divide, Screen, Overlay, Dodge, Burn, Hard Light, Soft Light, Grain Extract, Grain Merge, Difference, Addition, Subtract, Darken Only, Lighten Only, Hue, Saturation, Color, and Value.

I thought about including a screenshot of how each of these would affect a layer, but I think it would not be much more explicative than just asking you to play with them yourselves. Obviously, some of them are pretty self-explanatory for example, dissolve, darken only, and lighten only work pretty much as you would expect (however for dissolve to appear, you need to reduce the layer opacity which in fact increase the amount that is dissolved). From there, those of you with actual photography knowledge and / or color wheel knowledge might be able to sort through the rest of them, particularly dodge, and saturation. So the last thing you need to know is how to play with them. Well, in your favorite graphics manipulator select the layer you wish to edit, and there will be a pulldown box in the layer dialog window which says “normal” just change that to whatever you want. Keep in mind that without a colored layer behind the current layer you will not get a sense of the effect for most of these. So enough about that, let’s try it out and see some tricks.

1. I’m not sure which blog I found this trick on but it’s one of my favorites. If you take a photograph, like this beautiful one taken by my wonderful mother, duplicate the layer on top of itself and change the top layer’s mode to “soft light” you can remove the gray from a picture which actually adds a great bit of emotion and dynamism to a picture. You can actually duplicate that top layer again and again for a more dramatic effect, or you can adjust the opacity of the soft light layer to soften the effect. Be careful though if you plan on using this method with human subjects because certain colors can look unnatural.

   To see the difference simply hover the mouse over the image
2. Overlay and some others of these layer styles can be of great help when trying to add texture to a picture. In fact, you will run into this method in photoshop tutorials all the time. I think that texture is one of the single most obvious indicators for the professionalism of the artist when it comes to digital works.

   To see the difference simply hover the mouse over the image
3. Fade to black and white. This is actually a very interesting look that can do a lot of things for a piece. It’s so cool to me because it can do really things that are so contradictory. For example, you might add a sense of explosive motion to the picture, or you can slow motion to a stop, you could add an air of progress, or a shot of nostalgia. This method just relies upon the saturation layer mode and a layer filled with either black or white combine with a radial layer mask which we learned about last week.

   To see the difference simply hover the mouse over the image

So that’s enough talk out of me, you guys should try it yourself. Experiment experiment experiment, and best of all. As everything in our non-destructive editing series it leaves the original layer completely unharmed. Thanks to anyone who has friended me on Facebook, as always, I like to put a face with your name so that’s great. It has also inspired me to create a flickr group for you guys to publish your creations for others to see, as you add these new methods to your repertoire. Feel free to upload anything you try there, it doesn’t have to be wonderful, anything can inspire each of us to try something new or different. So I hope that some of you will take me up on that.